Dark Tourism BLOG
This page is intended to provide a more flexible and also more interactive element to dark-tourism.com, which is otherwise more static (more like an encyclopedia). The idea came about after the DT page I used to curate on Facebook was suddenly shut down by the company (full story here). So I’m continuing here – with regular blog posts, either featuring particular dark-tourism destinations or marking specific days in dark history and sometimes reacting to current affairs that are in some way relevant to this site’s topic.
sign up to the newsletter!
Two Reasons to Celebrate
on this day, 23 September 2021, my book is already being released in Germany, Austria and Switzerland! Whereas the release date in the UK and the US remains at 26 October. When I saw the date on the German Laurence King website I initially thought it must be a mistake, as I had assumed the October release date was the one to wait for in general. But I was then informed by my contacts at the publishers’ base in London that Germany will indeed be ahead on today’s date. It’s got something to do with
A Dead Musician and a New Poll
On this day, 51 years ago, Jimi Hendrix died. Arguably one of the most influential virtuosos on the electric guitar, his sudden death came as a great shock to the world of rock music at the time.
On the morning of 18 September 1970 Hendrix was found unconscious in his London hotel room by his girlfriend. She called an ambulance and he was taken to hospital, but all reanimation attempts failed and Hendrix was pronounced dead by midday.
He had been
20 Years!
Hard to believe that it is already 20 years today that “9/11” happened, the terrorist attacks by means of hijacked passenger planes that were steered into the Pentagon in Washington (well, Arlington, just outside the city to be precise) and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City, USA.
“Ground Zero”, the site of the collapsed WTC, and later the dedicated National 9/11 Memorial and Museum have become one of the most visited dark-tourism sites in the world. There’s
Sobibór
A week ago I came back from my two-week trip to Poland and Germany. One key element of this trip was to revisit Sobibór. Of the three sites of the Operation Reinhard (and “Final Solution”) death camps in eastern Poland, Sobibór had long been the most neglected, despite the famous revolt there in October 1943, which has twice been turned into a movie. In recent years, however, the Sobibór site has been totally transformed. First it
Riga & Tallinn
Last Wednesday I came back from a nine-day return trip to the Baltics, well, just to two of the capital cities, Riga in Latvia and Tallinn in Estonia. My first trip to the region had been in 2014, and I knew that in these cities a few new sites of relevance to dark tourism had newly opened in the meantime or had changed significantly, thus warranting a re-visit.
In Riga, the
Majdanek
On (or around) this day, 77 years ago, on 23 July 1944, the concentration camp of Majdanek was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. They found only a few hundred weak and ill prisoners left. The rest had already been “evacuated”. The SS retreated with such haste that they didn’t destroy much evidence of their deeds here, so the